Shooting the messenger

This is not only shameful, but downright criminal. An article in Forbes, details the troubles that have befallen whistleblowers who reported fraud with Iraqi reconstruction contracts.

According to the article,

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

Vance states that he reported all instances of abuse by the Iraqi company he worked for, with evidence, to an FBI agent in Chicago (his hometown). He did this, because he didn't know whom to trust in Iraq. He was right according to Vance, things went wrong in April 2006 when he and a colleague who helped him gather evidence, Nathan Ertel, were not only stripped of their security passes but also confined to the company compound. They called the American Embassy for help, and it sent a Special Operations unit to rescue them. They took the to the US Embassy were they were debried. However, their peace was short-lived. Later that night, both men "cuffed and hooded and driven to Camp Cropper," the same camp that once held Saddam Hussein.

There, they were subjected to interrogations, Ertel for a little over a month, and Vance for three months. Vance and Ertel say they were told that they were being held because the US military suspected the company they worked for of providing weapons to insurgents, the very charges Vance had reported to the FBI. However, that is not the only thing that the interrogators wanted to know. They also wanted to know why Vance had reported the fraud to someone outside of Iraq. During that 97 day period, according to Vance, he was subjected to harsh interrogation methods reserved for insurgents and terrorists. Both men, have now filed a lawsuit seeking compensation.

This is not the only instance, and it gets worst. The article also cites the cases of other whistleblowers such as Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse. "As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR." For her trouble, she was demoted and villified by her former friends in the military.

What is more troubling than this, is the fact that when these whistleblowers have filed "qui tam" lawsuits, the government has refused to join them. The lawsuits allow private citizens to sue on the government's behalf. The government has the option to sign on as a plaintiff, and has done so in the past in cases of Medicaid fraud. The government joining, makes the cases stronger and allow the government to recoup a percentage of monetary damages. According to the article, of all the qui tam lawsuits filed by whistleblowers alleging Iraqi reconstruction abuse, the Department of Justice has so far refused to join any of them, hurting their prospects in court.

The article has other examples.

Julie McBride testified last year that as a "morale, welfare and recreation coordinator" at Camp Fallujah, she saw KBR exaggerate costs by double- and triple-counting the number of soldiers who used recreational facilities.

She also said the company took supplies destined for a Super Bowl party for U.S. troops and instead used them to stage a celebration for themselves.

She told the AP, that after she voiced her concerns about possible fraud, Halliburton placed her under guard and in seclusion until she was flown out of Iraq.

Sigh. I don't even know where to begin with this. As the title of this post suggests, I do feel that the government and many of these companies have engaged in a policy of shooting the messenger. They see them as the culprits, and the bad apples, and not the abuse, fraud or anything else they report. It was the same thing with what happened with Abu Ghraib. Many people immediately questioned the press, and the whistleblowers for speaking up/reporting the abuse as if they were the problem. That was wrong then, and it is wrong now.

What really troubles me is the fact that the Justice Department has so far been missing in action on these cases. Where is the oversight? More than anything, this just piles on evidence of the complete incompetence of this administration.